Untangling Thoughts on Facilitation
Gábor Bittera
Full-stack Scrum Master and a Scrum Guide | Story and Metaphor Explorer | Creativity Facilitator | Proudly not holding any SAFe certs
After spending two days on the Gentle Cooperative Online Facilitation workshop offered by Francis Laleman and hosted by Tobias Mayer, it is now time to reflect on what just happened. To understand that, it is worth exploring what facilitation means: it comes from Middle French facile, a word that originates from Latin facilis meaning easy to do, easy or doable. But let me tell you, facilitation is anything but.
Facilitation by means of constraint
Good facilitation will, through a well thought out constraint, trigger the mind into thinking differently. As a result, some sort of a creative abstraction will emerge from that constraint: something unexpected that still relates to the subject matter but offers a new perspective -- and through this new perspective, we might gain a bit more insight.
Facilitation as a structure
Facilitation works best if it runs along a pre-constructed framework which flows through three stages, whose names originate from the Noh theatre in Japan: Jo (beginning or opening), Ha (break or development) and Kyu (fast or climax). When I look back, most of the powerful facilitation exercises I have encountered follow this structure. In Jo, we introduce the exercise and create a pattern, whilst in Ha the pattern is imprinted, developed further, becoming "muscle memory". In Kyu, the pattern breaks down and the real learning from the exercise is uncovered.
Facilitation through art
As described above, exciting constraints serve as basis for good facilitation. In most cases, our teams involved in knowledge work use mostly their analytical skills (left hemisphere of the brain) for reasoning and decision making. By drawing up constraints that trigger the right hemisphere through art (e.g. acting, drawing or poetry), we might be able to better engage our creative thought processes which can be useful when the logical and analytical engagement of the left hemisphere has run out of fuel.
With the learnings detailed above, I came to realise how much room for improvement my facilitation game has. So far, I feel I have been facilitating intuitively, without understanding the in-depth mechanisms of what makes good facilitation good. Now, it is time for me to sharpen the tools in my toolkit with the new learnings in mind and reframe the exercises that have become somewhat stale over the years.
Writer, Listener, Life Coach and Trainer. Together to get there.
4 年Thank you for this Gabor Bittera. Its brilliant to have people like yourself from the course reflect so much more succinctly profoundly and thought-fully than I could hope to. It was a mind-opening experience for me. Being a leetle bit older I’d had a lot longer to be ‘set in my ways and attitudes’. Many thanks for the almost invisible facilitation of Francis Laleman and generous hosting of Tobias Mayer.
Pastoral care for the corporate world
4 年An elegant and succinct summary, Gabor. It was a wonderful two days and I was happy to share the experience with you, and those others... Vasya Vankova, Emmy Amro, Ekaterina Neu, Gilberto Urueta, Luis Guimarres, Nick Perry, Christina Merz, Noel Warnell, Fikile Gotha, Caroline Gibbs, John Y. and Alistair Heslop :)
conceptual art and experience design practitioner & teacher, participatory design, cooperative learning, non-conventional facilitation, systems, agile communities, Sanskrit & Pali studies
4 年What a wonderful summery, Gabor, thank you so much! It was a great pleasure to have you in this online class. It really felt, after some time, that all of us were facilitating each other, and our 'learning' emerged cooperatively, didn't it? As I walk along, be sure that I will cherish your summary as a gemstone :)